Gucci cruise 2016 show review

The Italian luxury label joins the phenomenon of the pre-collection and presents a show with "realistic" clothes in New York

Gucci Cruise 2016 (Getty Images)

Alessandro Michele is the new man at Gucci, thrown headlong into fashion’s current breakneck schedule. In less than six months he’s shot two advertising campaigns and sent out two catwalk collections. By the end of the month, a third - purely menswear - will be added to the tally. They’re coming thick and fast - today marked his second, for Gucci’s latest pre-collection, the ranges that make up the majority of every designer brand’s clothing sales. Michele chose to stage it in New York.

It's an odd locale, you may think, for a label that made its mark as the ne plus ultra of Italian razzmatazz. However, the phenomenon of the pre-collection - like so many canny commercial fashion ideas - was born in America. And a multi-billion pound juggernaut like Gucci didn't get where it is today by ignoring commerce.

Besides which, there was interesting discussion post Michele’s uneven Gucci debut in March, of the fact many of his deliberately grannified clothes looked like stuff you’d see girls wearing on the streets of New York’s Williamsburg.

I’d say London’s Dalston - I’m sure most cities have a local coterie of girls who wear oversized glasses for aesthetic affectation rather than astigmatic correction, and team them with fusty brocade coats, musty chiffon dresses and knitwear that generally looks like it should be binned before the moths get the rest. As if to emphasise that point, for Cruise Michele had those girls literally wandering into his show venue straight off a Chelsea street. They wore clothes in much the same ilk as that autumn/winter show three months hence: namely, a rag-bag parade of vintage.

A model walks the runway at Gucci Cruise 2016 (Getty Images)

I get Michele’s point, which is to reiterate his new direction for Gucci, but there’s a fine line between consistency and repetition. This collection occasionally crossed it. That’s understandable. Michele’s predecessor, Frida Giannini, left Gucci suddenly in January, meaning he had only a month to pull together his womenswear debut. Naturally, you’d now want regroup and refine your message - backstage after the show you had the chance to inspect his lion-head frogging, piped linings, and pearl buttons set in a tiny golden double-G. Michele has a fetish for finicky detailing, for clothes made in the old-fashioned way. It’s endearing. As garments, these were often beautiful.

A model walks the runway at Gucci Cruise 2016 (Getty Images)

But the message was muddier. What was Michele trying to say - moreover, what does Gucci want to represent in today’s luxury marketplace? You can rest assured it’s not the provocative, borderline pornographic Gucci of old - the curled-lips of naysayers ask what all this has to do with the sexy, salacious heritage of a house that once advertised clothes via an image of a model with the brand’s signature ‘G’ shaved into her pubic hair.

A model walks the runway at Gucci Cruise 2016 (Getty Images)

That’s the point. Rather than making a decisive singular message, Michele’s Gucci is an assemblage of clothes, from which it’s easy to pluck what you like and discard the rest - both ideologically, and physically if you’re on a shop floor. They're trying to please most of the people, most of the time, with some of their stuff. They're being realistic.